Jason Bateman, the star of Netflix's hit show "Ozark," recently joined Deadline’s The Contenders Emmys event to talk about the next season of his series, which he called a sequel “as opposed to a second season.”

"Ozark" is a show set at Missouri's Lake of the Ozarks, but most of the filming is reportedly done in Georgia.

“We’re approaching ('Ozark') as a 10-chapter movie," Bateman said in the Deadline interview. "The second year is not a completely new story, but it is another single beginning, middle, and end."

Bateman, who was joined onstage at the DGA Theater in Los Angeles on Tuesday by his co-star Julia Garner, gave props to the Netflix format.

“It’s fantastic from a creative standpoint in that you can make assumptions that people are going to be biting off big chunks of this. From a writing standpoint, you don’t feel the same obligation to re-establish things.”

He also touched on comparisons of the show to "Breaking Bad," calling it “flattering.”

“You got a fortysomething-year-old white guy who’s got a family and a very domestic situation and he gets himself involved in a criminal situation in order to provide for his family,” Bateman said. “Hopefully, we separate a bit from that show, no better no worse.”

When asked about his other Netflix show, "Arrested Development," Bateman remained tight-lipped about the plot but revealed that “the next load of episodes will be on Netflix” before "Ozark," though release dates for either series have yet to be announced.

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Before Jason Bateman steps back into the shoes of Michael Bluth, the Arrested Development star will next return to Netflix for a much darker role. On Friday, Netflix will release a drama called Ozark, in which Bateman and Laura Linney play a husband and wife on the run with their two children. Ozark is set in the world of drug-money laundering and takes its name from the Lake of the Ozarks. The Springfield News-Leader talked to local residents about the show.
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He described the new season of "Arrested Development" as the “best year ever, and I’ve not said that before.”

Netflix has not announced yet when season two will premiere. It is expected to be released later this year.

Shirley Gross-Russel, whose family has owned the Alhonna Resort and Marina at Lake of the Ozarks since the 1980s, said in 2016 the resort was the setting for "Ozark," in which Bateman plays a money launderer.

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Bill Dubuque, the writer of the Netflix series "Ozark," once worked on the gas dock at the Alhonna Resort and Marina in Lake Ozark.(Photo: Andrew Jansen/News-Leader)

Gross-Russel said she was a little apprehensive about having her resort connected to a gritty crime drama, but she trusts people will realize it's just a TV show.

The reason Alhonna was picked, Gross-Russel said, is because the show's writer — Bill Dubuque — worked as a dockhand at the resort while he was in school in the late '80s.